Artist's Statement: In the Eye of the Beholder Scott J. Bailey
It happened one day that the master passed by the body of a dog, a carcass reeking and hideous, its fur matted, its limbs rotting away. One of those present said, "How foul its stench!" Another said, "How sickening! How loathsome!" Each had a voice of repugnance to add.
Then He spoke, telling them, "Look at the dog's beautiful teeth, how gleaming white they are."
Since moving to Egypt, I have come to understand with profound consequence that beauty might be found anywhere, right under my nose, directly beneath my feet, wherever I may be. This is a liberating concept for a painter who seeks to define a personal aesthetic from the inspiring images he beholds, but whose immediate environment is such a challenging and foreign one as Cairo.
What great freedom it is to know that in order to find worthy subject matter it will not be necessary to make a trip to the pristine White Desert. In searching for subject matter, it will not be necessary to dive into the opulent underwater world of the Sinai, nor to shut myself in my studio with a still life of fresh flowers. Those rare places are the usual subjects to me now-ones which have begun to lose poignancy and power for me as they feel more distant and superficial. Instead, to appreciate the exquisite qualities in the ordinary things around me, I need to focus, open my mind, and see them from new perspectives.
Within the detritus of contemporary life, even in the most banal or repellent scenery, is a complex microcosm to behold. Colors, textures, forms, and compositions of unimaginable beauty have shown themselves within the most unexpected of subjects: brackish puddles of water, decaying walls of architecture, stained bits of fabric, piles of rubbish, and rusting pieces of metal, to name a few. Seen with a painter's sensibilities, but with concerted efforts to grasp their uniquely important qualities and represent them also objectively, these paintings are split-second glances expanded into lengthy meditations. The light reflecting off of a discarded plastic bag might hold the same kind of visual splendor as the light reflecting off of the rippled surface of the Nile. The more I look, the more I see. The fine line between ordinary and rare, or exquisite and repulsive, blurs at times to the point of imperceptibility.
As the series continued to unfold (there are more than 60 paintings from this inspiration) each image has become a sentence, a vignette, a poem in itself. They are out of context and order, floating like the glut of images that bombard us in daily life, but they are creating a difficult sense of wholeness, nonetheless. Different paintings bring different metaphors, and together they are teaching me about my own vision and aesthetic while they remind me of the environment in which I live.
In addition to what these paintings have taught me philosophically and spiritually, they have been a joy to paint. Each one demands different technical concerns and encourages me to recall and pay homage to the techniques of other painters I have admired. I remain in debt to the tradition of painting; ultimately these are objects that celebrate the illusionistic magic of paint. The surface may be only micro-millimeters thick, but my investment in each work is intended as a sort of prayer in recognition of the priceless gift of these opulent subjects and our ability to see them.
The Beauty of Hybrid Painting Marilu Knode
When faced with the myriad formal discourse surrounding painting- the persistent dialogue pitting abstraction versus representation, how content can be fully conveyed by form, if text can function as image and not just sign-Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte's work "La Trahaison des images" (The Treason of images) (1929) comes to mind. In this modest work a wooden pipe floats in a sky blue ground with the childish cursive script "Ceei n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) below it. This deceptively simple declarative statement is anything but-it posits the dilemmas of the best paintings, challenging assumptions of vision and visuality. Magritte's pipe is necessarily an abstraction, for no one mistakes it for a real smoking implement. The addition of the text banishes any further pretext for realism for it flattens the historical illusion of a painting being a "window on the world." Finally, other than the occasional skywriting that advertises colas or movie premieres, how often do we see words in the sky? Not quite advertisement, not quite historical landscape, Magritte reflects on the dizzying multitude of signs that were spawned in contemporary Europe. This emblematic work lays to rest the fight over how a real or traditional painting should be, allowing for the experiments that have characterized the past hundred years of its practice.
The hybridity of human experience was reflected in avant-garde works such as "La Trahison des images" and the works themselves took on hybrid forms: paintings sported coli aged elements and room-size installations were cobbled together from the bric-a-brac of life. Yet often the works had great phenomenological strength but little visual attraction. These works were borne as acts of rebellion, reflecting the consistent pitch for the new that characterizes Twentieth century Western Modernism.
Hvbrid art became even more embedded in the daily circumstances of life in the 1960s, when another round of social and political upheaval, mirroring those of the Nineteenth century, but this time driven by artists outside the white, Western male point of discovery. Feminism, civil rights and gay rights all contributed to the deconstruction of the art object and the institutions that sustained them. Thus, the hybridity of an artist became as much content for artwork as did the materials put into their objects, and the term "multicultural" extended not just to minorities in the West but to be all-inclusive of artists from around the world, east meeting west.
In the late Twentieth century the notion of multi-cultural and hybrid existence has accelerated. Affected by the rapid exchange of money, information and populations, new cultural hybrids erupt as quickly as air travel engenders flu epidemics. The exchange of information is as rapid as the exchange of breath. In contemporary life it is the nomad that mitigates the collision of east and west.
As an American living abroad, painter Scott Bailey follows a long line of artists working outside of his normative cultural environment. Up until the mid-Twentieth century, the Western artist would either ignore the specific circumstances in which they were working and proceed as if they lived in Paris, London or New York; or they would exoticize their locale through a series of maneuvers which kept them from truly reflecting non-Western tradition. In the global climate in which we live, neither of these two options are viable. Instead, a third term must be created.
However, the simple existence of multiple layers of meaning in a work, or in its maker, does not grant art immediate or significant value. To make a painting now, for example, one must still deal with its' prescribed forms and historical baggage. Despite the multitude of experiments in the past hundred years that have undermined painting's premier status, how does this generation find its own form for reflecting contemporary terms of life? How can painters acknowledge Postmodernism's deconstruction of the function of art and its role within the commerce of culture, while skidding between the critical dialogue of painting's relevance in the face of newer technologies such as film, video and computer art?
Bailey has found his third term through a taut series of conceptual decisions that work against the boundaries of traditional oil painting while integrating the dislocation and disorientation inherent in his own personal circumstances. This conceptual grounding allows him to play with the vocabulary of every identifiable style of abstraction, from the radical spareness of Kasimir Malevich and the fleeting crosses of the serious jokester Ad Reinhard to the drizzly, sometimes abject patterns of Abstract Expressionism's psychodramas or the Rat "maps" of Richard Diebenkorn. This conceptual starting point explains the variability in style of Bailey's series-if a certain style is rendered "not as the original" it is due to the content, not the artist's intent.
The artist has restricted himself to working in a uniformly small scale that forces the viewer to examine each work from close quarters. The Abstract Expressionists used scale to envelope the viewer and to compete with the scale of architecture; Bailey's use of small scale reverses the hierarchy that assigns value based on size.
Against the dryness of his conceptual decisions Bailey has allowed for beauty to-periodically and uncontrollably-manifest itself. Many of these paintings have the "marks" of beauty: rich, luscious passages of paint; an intimate, tight format; access for the viewer via the references to any given painting's predecessors. This beauty, however, breaks down only after the viewer is caught up close, staring at what often dissolves into its real world referent-the surreal chaos of Cairo .
Where, exactly, would one find beauty in the urban environment so antithetical to the dreamed, neat, sanitized beauty of the West? These painted surfaces, built from layers upon layers of paint, scraped and carved, are subjected to the kind of disruptive activities that a city endures. They are sometimes muddy, as if extruded from the asphalt pavement that holds the desert at bay, or dry, like the sands that lick the edge of the urban landscape. Using the specifics of his environment, Bailey non-judgmentally finds the eloquence in the white tooth of a dog laying in the gutter or the organic decay of urine on a wall. Reflecting Leon Golub's question, "Do Paintings Bite?" These works say that they do. Paintings can be aesthetic objects while remaining firmly engaged in the material crap of our world.
The individual works in the series Mediations on Aesthetics lend to pool into three loosely identifiable areas: moody "landscapes," geometric abstractions, and descriptive (if sometimes repulsive) fragments. Naming the series, but not the individual works, alerts us to the series of structural parameters the artist has set out for himself.
The moody landscapes come closest to connecting to Bailey's own background and artistic experience. Prior bodies of work are evocative of the dark, misty landscape of the Pacific Northwest United States, where the artist grew up, and as exemplified by the work of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. These two artists were greatly influenced by Japanese art, yet Bailey's own meditations on that culture's forms derive from his years living in Japan.
The appearance of Op-art surfaces come from the crazy fabric patterns found in cabs, clothing and furniture, styles so dated that they seem fresh again in this context. If Op-art was a result of the psychedelic youth and drug cultures of the 1960s, then for Cairo it might reflect the adaptation of colonial remnants, now formally interesting, without the social bite they once had.
Though oftentimes unidentifiably opaque, the paintings of fragmented objects work most to unseat the proper forms and content outlined above. It is here that scale works most against us-by drawing us in to divine the actual objects depicted, we are caught, as voyeurs, staring at some very unsavory things. Peeled flesh in the market, generations of pooled spit on the ground, splayed feathers of a dying ibis are our reward. The artist refuses to forewarn us about what we will see, denying our prurient need to identify, and thus dismiss, the mess. These things don't exist for us, yet this decay is part of what fuels our chaotic lives.
These works are the result of the artist's grappling with the dis-ease precipitated by being engaged in another climate-social, cultural and climactic. If these were photographs of the same subjects we could pretend they were for a coroner's report, but as paintings they sit outside objective reportage. Rather than the universalizing ideology whereby everything is absorbed, cleansed, and re-presented through a Western lens, the lessons of multi-cultural Postmodernism derives their value from the specificities of place and time. The elements that mark the work, and by which time can be marked, is what gives significance to art for the culture from whence it comes.
Using this variety of experimentation in his work to define his place, Bailey proposes a Postrnodernism that is a space for making transparent the relation between content and form, and between experimentation and gesture. He finds new terms that are more subtle, prescient, having weight that conveys painting's ability to capture the details of human existence, no matter how troubling and disturbed it is.
Marilu Knode is Senior Curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
The World at Your Feet Adrian Saunders
Scott Bailey's latest paintings, an extended series of small panels that go through the gamut of texture and form, take the viewer by surprise. Large areas of white wall hold varied images, sometimes two or three, sometimes more, sometimes just one. They glow with color, or gaze with an opaque stare; they enter into relationships with one another, or with the gallery-goer; they stand and challenge the viewer to come to a conclusion; and they wear many masks, telling as many stories as we wish to hear. The pieces in this recent oeuvre are seemingly abstract, but on closer examination they are astonishingly representational. They tease and stimulate, and above all else they make demands on the eyes.
There is a playfulness here, which on closer examination is deadly serious. They drop hints that lead to recognition-and that is always left to the viewer-smile or philosophise, or simply write sentences. There is much that is jewel-like here, many faceted, polished by reflection and strongly suggestive of a hidden world. As a painter, Bailey is the magician that holds the key to this suggestion. He assumes a pose of modest omniscience, sharing his knowledge of what we see every day, but in fact choose not to see, for its familiarity takes away a dimension of inner sight. Bailey finds magic in the mundane.
Bailey's apparent omniscience stems from a fresh understanding of what we have been told to regard as visual information. In an urban environment we tend to look up and around, and to perceive what is stimulating or beautiful, intriguing or unsettling, on a level somehow different than that occupied by ourselves. It is easy to see and feel what we think makes a city from a position of detachment and dispassion. Quick aesthetic judgments are the order of the day, while only occasionally do we stop in our tracks for one of those moments of childlike wonder, even then standing back to take it all in. Bailey invites us to look down and see what lies beneath our feet, to see what appears to be enwrapping and involving us; he beckons us to participate in the very surfaces and textures of the city, the splashes of color that are fleetingly revealed in the most ordinary objects, the scrawls and graffiti, the bloodied hands on doorways, oil floating on water, that would reveal an unexpected spectrum if we didn't see it every day. Plastic cladding, scaffolding, piss on a wall reflecting the sunlight, old stones that break open and reveal the soil; he bids us enter into a dialogue with the very dust that makes a city real, for Bailey, like every magician, knows a secret. He knows that this beauty everywhere, in the most surprising places, reveals the logic and wisdom that is present even in the smallest and most unimportant things. A bone, a splash of yellow, the thick creamy adipose tissues and red gouts of butcher's meat, the delicate path of cigarette paper in wind, rust, fabric, the veining of marble that might so easily be something else, the complexity of ash are all in their own way revealing-and who are we to reject what tells us truth? Dame Julian, medieval madwoman or mystic, whatever you like to call her, that "recluse atte Norwiche," saw God contained in the complex folded surface of a walnut that she held in her hand. It is a statement that we are not invited to judge. Bailey, in his own way mystical, asks us to look with him and try to share his own secret, and whether we are to judge or not, is left to us.
The artist responds to this astounding visual richness all around him in a variety of ways. His panels are identical in size and thickness, simple squares of the plainest wood. They bear on their surfaces a vocabulary of gesture and tone that reflects the underbelly of the places in which he has walked, meditated and painted. Not only that, the paint dripping over the sides, into the soft textures and grain of the wood, creates its own images, reiterating the process of discovery again and again. Rome, Cairo, Los Angeles, it doesn't really matter, for the joy that comes from this insight raises these
images to a universal level. We look and create our own streets, OL own puddles, and wipe the dust from our own shoes. The paintings explore the link between what appears trivial and even repulsive and the greater world of which they are a part.
Bailey's choice of an equal-sized panel format is ideally suited to this exploration of the kaleidoscope that makes up the noisy and raucous world in which we live. He challenges the authority of scale normally associated with urban realities, by forcing the eye to focus on what are single images on the one hand, and yet suggesting a coherence in their diversity on the other, thus setting up a new visual counterpoint and creating unanticipated rhythm. Images can be moved from one place to another, creating new juxtapositions, opening up new dialogues. Pieces can be viewed in isolation or in groups, as and how the artist or the viewer wishes. The structures thus creates may be as symphonic as the streets from which they came, or as quiet as the moment in which a new image is realised.
Some of these pieces are quietly contemplative, with elegiac brush strokes that draw colors of extraordinary elegance across smooth surfaces; some are sensuously rich, dripping in melted chocolate or hot red wax that cries out to be touched. Some set up a tension as colors compete on brittle crackled surfaces, soft pinks, saturated blues, blazing yellows underlying rich autumnal coppers and purples, gobbets of paint that still seem to be moving with a life of their own across dripping, almost perspiring planes, and then a moment is captured, frozen forever in aquamarines, in a glassy underwater world. There are images of a raw and very physical energy; others are disturbingly gentle. Shapes are crude or sensuous sharp or refined, disconcerting or imbued with what feels like a sacramental calm.
The richness inherent in this approach has, I feel, only started to be explored. Every day there are new images to be added old images to be repainted, new narratives to be spoken. The work is, as a whole, gigantic and constantly evolving, and yet where there is such obvious variety, we must ask again if there is a compensating unity. Bailey's real secret is that each of these pieces is in fact a picture of the same thing; where he is wise is that he leaves us to decide what that is and then to find it in our experience every day.
Adrian Saunders is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the American University in Cairo